The Great Recession Blog

With CPI hitting a 40-year high today, as economists anticipated it would, inflation has shown us it is going to keep getting worse. People in some areas of the nation are already alarmed about food shortages. Prices are rising as shelves go empty. So are tempers.

Not even close to transitory. After giving its turkey advice for Thanksgiving, the Federal Reserve finally gave up completely on the “Inflation is transitory” chorus it has been singing all year. Chairman Powell of the People’s Bank of Amerika stated outright today that inflation is not transitory after all, confirming what I have been preaching […]

The US central bank has apparently taken on a new mandate — being your dietary coach, advising Americans to fight the inflation it helped ignite by eating tofurkey and other soy-based foods for Thanksgiving, instead of turkey.

We have just entered those days of heady inflation that I have said will kill the stock market and bond funds. There is a tipping point at which inflation and the interest changes that respond to inflation matter, but it has never been a clearly defined point.

Inflation is now rising faster than anything IHS Markit has ever seen in its Purchasing Manager’s Index, but it gets worse: It is not just cost outputs to consumers that are being passed along, but the rise in new input costs has also picked up pace. That means even higher price increases are building up […]

Joe Biden is looking a little Grinchy, having decided to fire the unvaccinated across America as we head toward the holidays. Even though the end of enhanced unemployment benefits has not brought back millions of former employees who’ve held out since the COVID lockdown, Biden decided it would be wise to fire a lot more […]

I want to thank my patrons for hanging in there with me while my writing has been less frequent than you deserve. I’ve been battling with COVID for the past two weeks while also in the middle of a house move, but I hope now to get more on track as I seem to have […]

To keep it simple: Nope! Not this time anyway. That is, however, what you hear from the wistful market makers who want to see last week’s CPI release as proof inflation was “transitory.” Let me disabuse you of that fantasy entirely.

Whenever I predict the market is going to crash or (as I recently have) that inflation is going to soar and then it does as I predicted, I get naysayers who claim — with no research to know what they are talking about — that I’m just a broken clock who happens to be right […]

I’ve bet my blog on my prediction that inflation will crash both the economy and the stock market, saying I believe with enough conviction that I’ll stop writing on economics if it fails to happen. Why? Because I wouldn’t want to be one of those doom-porn writers who keeps going even after major misses, and […]

When asked about where inflation is now and how it relates to how high the Fed thought inflation would reach and what the Fed’s targets for inflation really are, Powell made it clear that inflation is running much hotter than the Fed thought it would be and for longer: This is not moderately above 2% […]

As I promised in my last article, I’ll now lay out where inflation has gone since my June update. Because so much inflation has emerged in the last few weeks, I can hardly keep up with the number of ways in which it is soaring and the reasons it will be more persistent than the […]